Day 1 of Learning Russian
Today I decided, on a whim, to see how much Russian I could learn in 30 days. I speak 3 languages (English, Arabic, and Spanish) with *some* level of fluency, so this isn’t my first rodeo, but Russian is a beast of a language, and is unlike any of the other languages I know.
If you’ve ever been interested in learning Russian, I invite you to learn along with me, and use my updates as a guide! (pls pls pls I need a study buddy)
Here’s everything I did/learned on Day 1!
I am incredibly unfamiliar with the Cyrillic alphabet, and this has proved to be harder than I thought it would be. I think the way that I’m planning on studying this is mostly through vocab lists, but the mnemonics I’ve been using have definitely also helped. I studied this both in print and cursive. I think the hardest thing here for me so far is the pronunciation.
I have made a vocab sheet that’s separated into 4 categories: print, cursive, pronunciation, and the English word. Eventually I am going to want to take the pronunciation category out, but for now, they’re helping me as a comparison. I’ve also made these into physical flash cards. My goal will be to add 40-50 words every day (which may be ambitious, let me know 😭) along with reviewing the previous day’s words every morning.
In my Chinese class my first year of college, they had us do dictations where they would say words and we would have to figure out which characters they were and write out the pinyin (with tones). I have been doing this by playing back the words I learn and writing them out in the Cyrillic alphabet as often as possible. This is how I am doubling down on both the alphabet and the vocab.
- Since today was the absolute first day, I didn’t bother with too much grammar, outside of very basic sentence structure. This is definitely going to be the hardest part for me.
I am using apps on my phone to fill my free time with extra Russian, just so I'm always thinking about it. Currently this is AirLearn and Quizlet.
That's it---I will be updating this every day, for the next 29 days, and using my last 15 days of summer to focus on immersion and conversation.